Welcome back to Dry Powder.

Last week, Twitter released its 235-page proxy statement, the closest play-by-play look we may get into how Elon managed to artfully bully the company’s board into a sale. The document largely confirmed my suspicions about how it all went down, but there were a handful of revelations that genuinely took me by surprise. More on that in today’s column, below.

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Bill

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The fun starts on page 41, in the “Background of the Merger” section, with what you might call the quiet and calm anatomy of a quasi-hostile takeover. We know from Elon’s filings with the S.E.C. that he began acquiring his 73.5 million share position in Twitter starting at the end of January and finished up toward the end of March. Once assembled, on March 26, Elon called up his buddy Jack Dorsey, one of the Twitter co-founders who has just exited the Twitter board. Elon and Jack discussed the “future direction of social media, including the benefits of open social protocols.” That same day, Elon also called Egon Durban, one of the co-heads of Silver Lake Partners, a powerful Silicon Valley buyout firm and also a Twitter director. When they spoke, Elon and Egon discussed the possibility of Elon joining the Twitter board “as well as the fact that Mr. Musk had purchased a significant stake” of more than 5 percent in Twitter. Oh, that...